How Many Mountain Lions Are Too Many?
This happened sometime in the mid-1970s and was the only time I ever saw a mountain lion on the loose.
In 1971, California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a law imposing a four-year moratorium on hunting mountain lions in California.
Fifteen years later, just before Easter in 1986, a 5-year-old girl took a walk with her parents in a wilderness area just east of San Juan Capistrano -- where she encountered a mountain lion. "There was no warning, no nothing. It grabbed her by the head and ran off with her," the girl's mother told the Los Angeles Times. "I thought I would never see her again."
Fortunately, a man who was hiking nearby, the Times reported, "used a stick to beat the cat, which released the child's head from its powerful jaws and disappeared into a thicket."
Seven months later, a mountain lion attacked a 6-year-old boy as he walked in the same park with a group of children.
"The children ran ahead of us about 15 yards and around a curve," the boy's father told the Associated Press. 'You could hear laughing. Then all of a sudden it turned into screams."
"The mountain lion had [the boy's] head in his mouth," said the father.
"I ran at it with a knife," he said. "Right before I got to it, [the lion] released him."
In 1990, four years after mountain lions attacked these two children, California voters considered Proposition 117 -- which would ban hunting mountain lions. They approved it 52.42% to 47.58%.
The proposition, of course, did not ban mountain lions from hunting humans.
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